Reforged Labs lands $3.9m to power game ads with AI

With over 500,000 games on Google Play Store and Apple App Store, mobile game developers face intense competition to capture user attention in today’s market. To that end, putting video ads on TikTok or Instagram has become a popular marketing strategy. 

Creating these ads can be time-consuming, however, and Reforged Labs believes that AI can help. 

Reforged Labs co-founders (from left) Oscar Xing Luo and Robert Huynh / Photo credit: Reforged Labs

The Singapore-based startup recently closed a US$3.9 million seed round led by DCM, a VC firm based in Silicon Valley. Y Combinator, Goodwater Capital, Phoenix Fund and several angel investors from the gaming sector also participated, including a co-founder of Axie Infinity creator Sky Mavis and Sebastian Knutsson, co-founder of Candy Crush developer King. 

Established by Robert Huynh and Oscar Xing Luo in September 2023, Reforged Labs wants to leverage generative AI to automate and optimize aspects of video ad creation for mobile games. Huynh serves as the firm’s CEO while Luo is the chief technology officer.

Quick pivot

Reforged Labs initially aimed to use genAI to help game studios develop in-game content. 

But Huynh, a Harvard Business School dropout, realized that this approach didn’t address one of the biggest pain points for game developers: effective game marketing, which requires a lot of experimentation. 

Prior to founding blue-collar job marketplace Nook in 2021 and Reforged Labs in 2023, Huynh spent eight years at tech titans Alphabet (Google, moonshot factory X, and self-driving car spinoff Waymo) and Microsoft, including its Xbox division.

Huynh says that some major game studios spend up to “93% of their entire budget” on advertising and marketing. In 2022, total ad spending on games reached US$26.7 billion, according to mobile marketing analytics platform AppsFlyer, with 2023 numbers being at roughly the same level.

Image credit: iCandy Interactive

Most smaller studios don’t have the expertise or tools to compete with the user acquisition campaigns of large studios, Huynh adds.

Developers often outsource ad creation to agencies, which are “historically very expensive” and have slow turnaround times due to “long feedback loops,” notes Carol Lu-Vernooij, chief marketing officer at Reforged Labs.

The startup is developing a subscription-based platform that mobile game studios can use as an end-to-end solution for video ad creation, covering everything from idea generation and storyboarding to optimization of ad variations.

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